


The Brightest of the Stars (When Teebo Met Latara)

by Ewok_Poet



Series: Ewoks - odds, ends, missing bits and a continuation [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Ewoks
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-10-08 19:39:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10394586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ewok_Poet/pseuds/Ewok_Poet
Summary: A wokling unaware of his nature powers does not like attention and he lets his fears of others guide him, unaware that he is different for a good reason. And then he meets a girl who is his polar opposite. Many years later, he gets the opportunity to tell the story to his daughter and a couple that faced their own hardships, in a world that was initially nothing like his own.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This story's prologue and epilogue take place one day after About a Boy and is otherwise something that would never end up being posted in its current form. For one, it was planned to be a short anecdote near the end of an upcoming 100+ chapter fic and the only way to tell it like this would have been a flashback. I found out that the same was the case for About a Boy - sharing Yehan's past hardships would have not been fitting for the narrative of the said longfic. So, this is an extra scene type of a thing, but not quite.
> 
> Some extremely nerdy notes on Ewoks:
> 
> Joe Johnston's 1984 story "The Adventures of Teebo: A Tale of Magic and Suspense" has Duloks, then led by King Vulgarr, kidnapping all the other Bright Tree Village woklings. Teebo, then an awkward, withdrawn wokling teased by others and continuously sensory overwhelmed due to the Force-sensitivity he is not aware of, goes after them. The only other wokling named in the story is Malani, who is very, very young, barely able to walk.
> 
> Since some Starlog and Star Wars Insider guides and cues in some episodes (e.g. in Tree of Light, Teebo is old enough to go on the quest) have established Teebo as slightly older than his peers at the beginning of the Ewoks cartoon, Kneesaa's age was estimated at 14, Wicket's at 12 and Malani's at 8 (which I took to mean the age one receives their first hood).
> 
> And, as I have previously stressed at the time I wrote my first Ewoks fic - it's impossible that all the Ewoks comics, books, cartoons et cetera took the place one year before the Battle of Endor. For so many reasons. I have my own timeline, which places the first season of the Ewoks cartoon one year before the Battle of Yavin, thus making the Imperial presence at the end of the second season believable and fitting with what Palpatine was doing when he was creating the second Death Star.
> 
> With all of this in mind, I determined Teebo to have been 15 around the time of the first season of Ewoks, about 19 for Return of the Jedi. He was definitely about 8-9 in "The Adventures of Teebo: A Tale of Magic and Suspense", given an infant-to-toddler Malani. Since he's himself a bare-headed wokling in the first chapter of his story, it takes place in 8 BBY, so does the second chapter. The third chapter takes place a year later, in 7 BBY. All of this allows me to set 8 snows/years as the age when the woklings get their first hoods.
> 
> My backstory for Latara is entirely fanon - but it would explain her absence from all the Ewoks comics but one. It would also explain why her mother looks noticeably younger than the other mothers.

The view from the Trading Post’s log cabin and its dining table located under a plain glass ceiling was the best. Better than the one on Corellia.

On top of it, it was a starry night above Endor, the kind that Luufi liked the most. Perhaps living at mom and dad’s home planet was not that bad at all! The impromptu ceremony the day before, when her adopted brother, Yehan, received a proper hood, had been exciting, too. If she was right about it, she was to have one of her own, together with Talthuk and Theesa, in three years’, or as they would say here, three snows’ time.

And Yehan had been excited beyond belief, indeed. He slept until lunch time that day and proceeded to admire his newly-hooded reflection in the mirror, an object which he was still not quite able to grasp, speaking to it in a made-up language, with only a word or two of Ewokese. Eventually, he turned away from the mirror and then he threatened it. Luufi had figured out that, in his mind, his reflection was now jealous of him, even though it bore the very same dark red hood. She was also sure that she did not want a blood-red hood herself someday.

Mommy and daddy had to get Yehan out of there somehow and get him to do something else, she thought. And the night was bound to be starry and there was only one place where she wanted to be. She had an idea. There was still plenty of food left from the night before and she suggested that they should carry it to their friends at the Trading Post, who had not attended the ceremony. The suggestion took a bit of time to be accepted, but granny Batcheela and grandpa Warok were eager to take care of Yehan for one evening.

Three minutes later, Latara's speeder, the only one of its kind in the Happy Grove much to Paploo's dismay, docked on the platform neck to the log cabin of the Trading Post's living quarters and the three rang a tiny metal bell next to the door. This place was, in a way, neither very Endor nor very Otherworld. Some things were Stone Age, some were later Hyperspace Age, some seemed to have been somewhere in-between.

“Teebo, Latara, Luufi, hello!” the Human woman with brown hair in a messy bun, wearing a green coat and high red boots was excited to see them. “Where is Yehan?”

“We are going to wait for a bit before we introduce him to anything overly technological.” Latara handed a bunch of wooden pots to the woman. “Even a mirror was too much for him and we even had some of those when I was little…Dad had traded two handful of monmon seeds for it at Mooth’s, may his spirit rest among the stars!”

“So, something like me, but the other way round?” the bespectacled Human man hugged his partner from behind and grinned.

“Something like you, yes. But you know that we’re not letting you run around so you wouldn’t find yet another Force nexus or a hungry hanadak.” She shrugged and turned around to kiss him on the lips. “And Latara, why am I not surprised that you always owned a mirror?”

“Ha!” The Ewok carried the rest of the pots to the dining table herself. “And why am I not surprised that the two of you are more romantic than you were the first time we met?” She winked. “And all of this is from Yehan’s ceremony. We thought that introducing you” – she looked the man’s way again – “to Endor would be safer if we started with food. So, here we have – some dangleberry juice jelly, Batcheela’s chicken sausages and vegetable stew…Malani once told Kneesaa that hers is better, but it’s not…anyway, there is a lot of it. And it’s all ‘organic’ as you would say, so don’t worry.”

And this is how Luufi found herself under her favourite ceiling again, with the most stunning display of stars that she knew, something that she could not see from anywhere else than the observatory, the place that was still too Endor for her.

But this was the only place on the Forest Moon where she was not the only one who was confused by its oddities. She looked to her right, to the freckled face of her Human friend’s partner and thought of something – he had been feeling lost there as much as she did, after all.

“So, Twig, are you used to Endor yet?” she said, with a mischievous grin. “When are you going to take those black gloves off?”

“Luufi!” Teebo almost dropped his large helping of spikeback pike and it was only by the means of his nature powers that he managed to stop it seconds before it reached the ground. “We told you that you should not call him that way!”

“It’s fine.” The man pet the wokling. “Since I am getting away from myself for a while, I could as well be called by another name.” He proceeded to light a cigarra. “But, at some point, I have to think of how to get my dual tube phasing modulator here. And the TMZ-102015.”

“Yay, I mean, ee-chaa!” Luufi was not quite sure what a TMZ-102015 was, but claiming that she knew it was bound to make both of them feel less lost on Endor.

For a couple of minutes, she was looking at the stars, then she shrugged and emptied a tiny jam jar over her slice of honey melon pie, one of the things she did like about her new home. Once the plate was empty, she stopped, scratched her bare head and clapped her hands.

“When Talthuk, Theesa and I are old enough to receive our hoods, is our ceremony going to take place in the Council Hut, too? Or…can we get them here?”

Latara shook her head and smiled.

“No, Luu, Yehan’s ceremony was an exception! You are going to receive your hoods at the Festival of Hoods, which takes place on the shortest night of the year. There is always a large feast accompanying it, too; but it’s all held underneath the Soul Trees, for they allow us to be here and they protect us, together with our ancestors’ spirits.”

“Can we have Soul Trees?” the bespectacled man asked, but the Ewoks did not know what to answer and neither did his partner. For a moment, there was awkward silence.

"Daddy, how was your Hood Festival?" Luufi asked again.

Teebo smiled broadly, his buck teeth no longer obscured by a corrective device that he had been wearing for a couple of months in the “future world”, as some of his childhood friends were calling it. Luufi had the same teeth herself, much to her mother’s horror, but she loved them that way and she did not want them corrected, either.

"We were grounded.” Teebo seemed a bit embarrassed. “We were grounded for some mischief - Wicket, Paploo and I - and then, I had a premonition that a forest fire broke and then we ran to...wait, that was your aunt's ceremony! Mine...err...hmmm?!"

Latara gave her husband a subtle tickle behind his right ear. “That’s not the way it was, honeydrop! I dare you to tell Luufi and these two Kyoopid-struck munyips what it was really, really like!” She pouted and stuck out her tongue, something that Luufi was not sure if the other mothers were doing. “And you, take that thing out of your mouth!” she scolded ‘Twig’. It smells worse than Deej’s pipe!”

Teebo closed his eyes. Latara was right. Somehow, with all the adventures, the places they had visited and the intense memories of pretty much every single moment he had witnessed, the things got mixed up. He was not sure if that was a common trait of Force-sensitives, or if he had just lived a life that was way too eventful for his age of thirty snows. And his Human friend, she was thirty, too – much younger than her mate, slightly older than Latara. Was she forgetting things like that as well? He looked across the table to meet her eyes.

“D…d….” He begun, but he was not sure what he was going to ask her and how was he supposed to phrase it.

“D….d…do you have some prism pebbles with you?” the woman asked him in return. She fondly remembered the first time that Teebo showed her how the Ewoks were telling stories to their fuzzy children, over some bonfire on her favourite beach on Vagran.

Teebo nodded. “Chak! But I am going to need a fire pit. You don’t have one here.”

“I know.” The woman pulled the cigarra out of her partner’s mouth. To his surprise, she mashed it between her fingers and threw it on the spherical metal surface that served to keep the food warm. “Luufi, where is that little project of ours from some weeks ago? Do you remember? The one when we recreated the historic strangeness that is…paper?”

Luufi pointed to the cupboard behind her. “You had left it here!” She got up and proceeded to tear the sheets of light-beige homemade paper and throw them on the pile. Within a couple of moments, the pile was burning.

“That’s great!” The man said. He pointed a glove-clad hand to the pile. “Teebo, I have to teach you this one sometime. It’s not a dark side…Night Spirit thing…ummm…honest!”

His laser-crafted synthteeth were, once again, met by his Ewok friend’s raw, buck-toothed grin. He could never tell if Teebo was menacing, or just not the prettiest creature in the Galaxy.

“Is this good enough? Are the prism pebbles going to work?” the woman asked.

“I think so…” Teebo seemed unsure of it. He pulled a tiny prism pebble out of his satchel and threw it over the fire. A cloud of smoke emerged from the fire and travelled towards the ceilingm where it spread and obscured the actual stars in the sky. A stardust-like, connect-the-dots picture of a scruffy wokling with what looked like lots of head and chest fur, formed before the group.

Teebo was pleased.

“Chak, it’s good enough. Now I just need to allow this story to come out of its hiding place.”

The man looked down. He could relate to the idea of not wanting to share some stories more than anybody else in the room. He glanced at the painting of the sunrise on the wall in all the shades of blue and red, and then back at the wokling made of the mysterious stardust-like substance. Could that have been…Teebo? Impossible. It looked like a mere…test projection. But it had Teebo’s eyes. So…t was Teebo, then. His glove-clad hand reached out to his partner’s much smaller, bare hand.

Meanwhile, Luufi crossed to the other side of the table and sat on her mother’s lap, her little hands still sticky from the jam. For some reason, the ever-so-tidy Latara did not mind. She looked at her husband, expecting an answer.

“Latara, I accept your dare.” Teebo mimicked his daughter’s mischievous grin. “And if I do manage to tell it all the way it really was…”

She raised an eyebrow. “Chak, I know…now start it already!”

The woman clapped to turn off the light.

And so, the story unfolded right before the four eager observers, dragging itself from the deepest corners of the heart deep below the gurreck skull headdress-clad façade and the mind behind the forest green eyes.


	2. Chapter 01

That evening, Warok had to leave Batcheela and Teebo again.

He was attending the Warrior Overnight Trip, and that was to be followed by a scouting mission somewhere close to the Gorge of Fire. All of this was hopefully going to get him closer to completing his Belt of Honour. A great glider pilot, he lacked the patience essential for other kinds of tasks. Or so thought Kazak, the newly elected Head Elder. The old lurdo refused to let Warok have the status of a proper warrior before he learned to be “disciplined”, whatever was that supposed to mean in his mind.

And it might have been personal, too!

He already disliked the free-spirited twenty-five-snow-old fisherman for breaking the rules and he had subjected him to a couple of hearings in front of the Council of Elders in the past. The most notable of those was held when the village found out that Batcheela, the daughter of two warriors held in high regard, was carrying Warok’s child and that he wanted to marry her. They had been only eighteen snows old, and it was a disgrace! Kazak might as well have been more shocked than Chief Chirpa himself. After all, Chirpa did not care all that much. He was head over heels in love with his wife, Ra-Lee.After his red-furred daughter Asha had come into the world, he had become noticeably softer, always hoping that the next wokling the tree spirits blessed him with would be his heir, the new prince.

Kazak’s breeding years were long past him. His children were adults and they had their own children already. And they were all disciplined. Just the way everybody should have been.

Therefore, he could simply not let Warok become a warrior until he truly, truly deserved it. He gave him more and more errands, in order to keep him from turning into another version of that meek eggcake Chirpa and other younger family men like Deej Warrick. If nothing else, Deej’s sons were showing the signs of becoming true, manly warriors themselves. Warok’s almost-bastard child was undoubtedly male, but a very strange creature, with his eyes of forest green and patches of fluffy fur. Strange.

And that was certainly not how the said child saw himself, looking at his own reflection in the bathwater, interspersed with reflections of numerous stars.

While he was always worried about daddy Warok, little Teebo loved it when he was away – he would get a chance to sleep next to his mommy. He understood her name quite literally; she had been named for a wind spirit that comforted the Ewoks when they slept, in return for their fur’s ability to keep her warm. With these thoughts, he was able to fall asleep quickly and not swing in his hammock until he was too tired to stay awake. He could just press his head against his mommy’s shoulders and block at least some of the unintelligible whispers that had been bothering him ever since he had learned to say his first word. He did not know where they were coming from, but since his first word some snows ago had been “tree”, he had assumed that they were the whispers of the trees. What they whispered and chanted about sounded like a language from another world and occasionally, a word or two of proper Ewokese would break through.

Teebo was not willing to share this little discovery of his with anybody – for one thing, he didn’t know if the other woklings were able to listen to the nature, too. They could have been much better than him at understanding these whispers and that could have been another reason to mock him. He did not play with any of the other woklings all that much to begin with. The Warrick brothers, Paploo, Flitchee...they did not like the idea of a bare-headed wokling running after them and a couple of munyips always running after him and then, more often than not, somebody ending up tripping on them. And he looked like a girl wokling to them, too. What were those fair bangs on the top of his head about?

The younger woklings were still too little to talk to, and often bitey on top of that. Whenever he would attempt to do something he was truly interested in – such as finding an adolescent or an adult who would help them practice their reading and symbol writing skills – they would protest. Learning things was not as fun as breaking them. Eating food was not as fun as food fights.

Sometimes he thought that the older ones would finally take him seriously when he received his first hood. He knew his ceremony was due to take place soon, as it always took place on the shortest night of the Endor year. Maybe the younger ones would stop pulling his scruffy chest fur and biting him. Maybe he would not have to resort to telling the munyips to trip whomever was threatening him, so he could run away.

Until then, he was by himself, most of the time. And that particular evening, he was more than happy to play alone in the large wash tub near the window opening. For one thing, it was welcome refreshment on a hot summer night. The two suns had long gone to sleep and he could see the Sistermoon in its corner, below Tana. He spread his little stubby legs and made space for the celestial bodies to reflect in his bath. When he ran his finger through the water, they became distorted and be gone for a moment. When he sat calmly and wait for them to appear again, they seemed brighter and bigger than they were the last time around. He liked that. The warm wind that would occasionally blow would bring musings of the trees his way – but he only understood every twentieth word or so.

Across the chamber, his mother was sitting on the rocking chair that wasn’t really rocking – the two tusks that his father had found on the edge of the desert needed to be polished a bit more in order not to get stuck to the floor boards as often as they did. Then again, nothing in Warok and Batcheela’s one-chamber hut was the way it should have been in the first place – they got it from the Council of Elders after they got married. The marriage was unplanned. Warok was still a warrior apprentice at the age of twenty-four snows. He could not have built a new hut just yet!

Just them, a figure appeared in the doorway – somebody unlikely to ever knock on the frame before entering the hut.

“Goopa, Batcheela!”

“Goopa, Bozzie!” Teebo’s mother looked the visitor’s way, but did not get up. He casted a glance at the figure clad in a long red dress with a purple hood, her lips smeared with crimson-coloured powder, her large chest dangling as she approached the fire pit. “Didn’t expect you this late!”

“I was filling in for my brother, telling a story to the woklings on the Main Square.” Bozzie pointed to the prism pebbles in her hand. “It was about the dangerous creatures of the forest – boar-wolves, gurrecks, the hanadaks…and he still cannot bear himself to talk about it, after poor Ra-Lee and Asha have been mauled! So, he put Kneesaa to sleep and I was sharing the little I knew of these beasts. I hope that’s enough for them to be able to recognise one if they see it.” She let a loud sigh. “My poor sister-in-law and my poor little niece, who must have been eaten alive, with only that hood remaining behind.”

A pair of green eyes peeked from above the edge of the wash tub. Teebo’s water was getting cold and the clouds now covered the sky, so he could not play his game of tracing the stars anymore. In fact, he could not do much more than listen to the two women talk. Truth be told, Bozzie was doing most of the talking. She had heard this and that from Shodu, she was completely sure that old Needoo stole a pack of flour…and she did not stop. Little Teebo could see the similarities between this woman and her son – they both talked too much, and half of it seemed to be untrue, to the point where his eight-snows-old self could not believe it.

Finally, Bozzie stopped to catch a breath. Batcheela was just smiling sheepishly. At some point, she had lost track of the conversation and was looking for a way to make it stop.

“I have baked honey melon pie today, if you would like some,” she said to Bozzie, who nodded and licked her lips.

“Me too!” Teebo’s little hands splashed against the water. “Please!”

Bozzie turned around. It was only then that she spotted the little one and walked up to him.

“Just how cute your wokling is!” The visitor ruffled her three fingers through the scruffy fair fur on top of Teebo’s head. “The love children are always the most beautiful! Batcheela, you’re going to have all the girls of the Bright Tree Village march to your home once he’s old enough to burn the sacred branches.”

The little Ewok turned away, giggling.

“Come on…don’t be shy. You are going to be popular, like your daddy. I am sure that you already like being in the company of warriors!”

“No.” Batcheela responded for her shy son and handed a wooden plate with a large slice of pie to Bozzie. “He is slightly scared of them. But he likes other adults, for example…old Logray!”

Bozzie almost dropped the wooden plate. “K’vark! The old fool who claims he was been blessed by some kind of nature powers? And has that alleged powerful gem? Ha! Not a good role model for the young ones, I say!” She sat down and took a bite of the pie. “Ee cha waa ma, Batcheela, you baked another honour-belt pie! Anyway, where was I? Once this boy has received his first hood, he’ll be given lookout duties. That will help him become a little bit braver. After all, they all start out like that!”

Teebo finally found the courage to say something. “No. I don’t want to be a warrior. Can I…pick flowers?”

“Nonsense!” Bozzie shook her hand in dismissive manner. “You will be a warrior, like your father. And you will marry a pretty girl. And I am going to give you a big kiss once you have received your hood tomorrow!”

Teebo’s pupils grew wide. “Big kiss? Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow!” She clapped her hands. “Batcheela, don’t tell me that he doesn’t know?!”

“It was supposed to be a surprise.” The sheepish smile appeared on Batcheela’s face again. “Or…well…you see…he is very shy. We didn’t even go for the test fitting at Fashkaa’s.”

The tone of Bozzie’s voice changed.

“What do you mean, you didn’t go for a test fitting? Only the woklings of our warriors who moved to other villages don’t have test fittings. Take him for a test fitting in the morning!”

Teebo swallowed a lump.

“Sure.” Batcheela said. “I’ll do it the first thing in the morning.”

After Bozzie had stomped out in a huff, Batcheela went to get her little boy from the tub.

The wokling drew an imaginary line in the water for one last time, with his toe, as she picked him up. And then his laughter turned into a suspicious expression.

“Mommy?”

“Chak?”

“Where is Paploo’s daddy?”

She ignored the question, smiled again and lay Teebo down on the only table in the small hut to dry him off. With Bozzie gone, he was his relaxed wokling self again – snuggling against the towel, giggling as she tickled his tummy.

After a hearty helping of honey melon pie, she tucked him in on Warok’s side of the bed. He fell asleep quickly. Finally, she could stop walking on eggshells. He forgot about that fitting and the eventual ceremony pretty quickly. But his mother was still aware that it was not going to be easy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warrior overnight trip is mentioned in Horville's Hut of Horrors.
> 
> The Gorge of Fire appears in The Rainbow Bridge.
> 
> Festival of Hoods is the event where woklings come out of age, as in, receive their first hood.
> 
> The background on Warok and Batcheela is fanon, but as we know from Return of the Jedi, Warok IS a skilled glider pilot.
> 
> The background on Chirpa's family, apart from the bit with Paploo's absent father - this was never explained in a children's cartoon - is canon.
> 
> The analogy Teebo makes between his mother and the spirit of Batcheela is an expansion of what is known about that spirit.
> 
> Burning the sacred branches is a reference to my fanon on Ewok weddings. Branches of the groom and bride's Soul Trees burn together in their hands.


	3. Chapter 02

The next day, right after a delicious breakfast of egg-cake and blasé tree goat milk, Batcheela took little Teebo by hand and took him to the hoodmaker’s hut. He seemed calmer than the evening before, but he was not particularly enthusiastic.  
  
Fashkaa, the hoodmaker, was expecting them. Of course, Bozzie had to wake up very early and let her know that they were coming. Then again, it was always nice to see a creation she was particularly proud of – the blue hood that she had made for Batcheela. It was a practical one, easy to convert into a front-covering robe that could be worn after one wokling too many. And if Batcheela ever had another wokling, Fashkaa had this vision of turning the upper part of the hood into a whole new hood for a female Ewok. A mother and a daughter wearing a piece of the same cloth? That would make everybody go ee-cha wa maa!  
  
“Goopa Batcheela! Goopa, little one,” she said, solely for the timid wokling to hide behind his mother’s back. “Teebo, right?”  
  
“Goopa…right.” Teebo peeked from behind Batcheela, more or less attempting to crack a smile, then hid again.  
  
Batcheela nodded and clapped her hands. “Fashkaa, we are here for Teebo’s first hood.”  
  
The hoodmaker winked. “It’s ready.” She headed to the large branch with many test hoods on it and picked a dark red one. “You’re surely going to like this one, little warrior. It’s a reminiscent of your father’s hood.”  
  
Teebo finally peeked out from behind Batcheela’s back and allowed Fashkaa to place him on a small log and fit the hood on him. Then she raised him above a barrel of water right in front of the hut.  
  
“Look at that little warrior!” she said.  
  
Teebo was confused. The hood was too tight around his neck, red like fire, red like blood and he did not like it at all. There was something about it that was not him – there was a wrong sound to this colour somewhere between the threads of its fabric.  
  
“It’s going to be a big day! Everybody is going to be looking at you as Chief Chirpa presents you with what I have just made for you.”  
  
“E…everybody?” There was suddenly a fearful tone in little Teebo’s voice.  
  
“Everybody!” Fashkaa gave him what was supposed to be a reassuring nod.  
  
This got the wokling into a panic. He did not like being ridiculed by a group, but he could not bear having others cheer him on, either. The idea of so many eyes looking at him, trying to determine what he was going to become someday – the idea of standing in a clearing where so many beings and so many trees would talk at the same time – it all sounded like too much noise for him.  
  
“No!”  
  
He got himself out of the hood and, before Fashkaa and Batcheela knew it, he kicked down a roll of fabric and disappeared under the nearest pile of leather scraps.  
  
“Teebo!” Batcheela called her son. No answer.  
  
Fashkaa was already looking under the tables. “I guess he’s very nervous because this will be such an important day for him! I mean, he’s eligible for lookout duties come tomorrow!”  
  
“No. I think he’s nervous because he does not want to do be around others all that much.”  
  
“Now, that would be odd, Batcheela.”  
  
“Not for him, no.”  
  
Meanwhile, little Teebo found a way out of the hut and onto the platform. He intended to go home, lie down in his hammock and refuse to come out. He ran by some of his favourite trees and passed the supply hut, and he was about to climb the stairway to the top level when he noticed something. He caught a vine and swung down to a lower level.  
  
There, on one of the village’s dead-end platforms, was a hut he was sure he had not visited before. The passage leading to it did not have a regular wooden fence. Instead there were poles with small animal skulls on them. The hut itself was decorated with horns and, in a couple of places, there were marks and symbols written in red and orange paint. How come he had not seen it before? It was interesting! There was a wooden crate by the window, so he climbed on top of it and went inside.  
  
The interior was even more fascinating than the exterior. There was a large map on the wall, a small table and a canopy bed raised on a platform, which he had not seen in any other hut before. There were two fire pits, one topped with a large cauldron and another that looked like the one they had at home.  
  
And then, a large shadow with a bird beak and a long tail appeared behind him.  
  
“How did you get in?”  
  
That’s when Teebo realised where he was. He found himself in the hut that most Ewoks did their best to avoid – that of Logray, the notorious recluse and former warrior. According to his parents, most families would call on the old man if a birth was not going well, if a wokling was sick or if somebody was badly wounded. He had incredible medicine man skills, they said, but the rest could have been delusions. The night before, Bozzie hadn’t spoken fondly of him and there was that mention of some “gem” in his hut.  
  
“I…ran away.” Teebo’s confession came with a sigh. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t want to break into your hut. I wanted to hide.” He broke down.  
  
Logray was intrigued. This wokling – he had seen him before – was always playing all by himself. And now, he was led to his lonely dwelling, of all places in the village. When woklings were in trouble, they usually hid in the places like the chicken coops, the bordok stable and the supply hut.  
  
His first thought was to take the boy back home. But then he changed his mind.  
  
“Why did you run away?”  
  
“I don’t want to wear a long red hood. And I don’t want to be a warrior. And the trees…”  
  
  
“You don’t want to be a tree?” The old man tried to cheer up the boy. “Now, that one is new to me.”  
  
Teebo sat down on the edge of the small platform. Logray leaned on the beam next to him and looked into his eyes, expecting an answer.  
  
“No, I would not mind that. I just don’t know what exactly they’re saying. And if they start to chant, like they always do in the evenings, during the hood ceremony tonight…”  
  
“The trees chant?”  
  
“Chak! Sometimes they say something I understand, but most of the time, no. Can you hear them, too?”  
  
This got Logray by surprise. He had been feeling lonely ever since the day the hissing of the Tulgah Witch’s pet skee and the gibberish her Yuzzum slaves uttered while munching on lantern bird thighs suddenly began making sense to him. But he was a warrior, thirty or so snows old when he had been captured, and, until he had found himself hanging on a rope wrapped around a mantigrue’s tail high above the forest, he had thought he was just very, very brave. This wokling here was very young, timid and exceptionally polite – there was no single sign of rebellion in him.  
  
“It’s too early.” He more or less said to himself.  
  
“Too early for what, sir? For me to get a hood?”  
  
“No.” Logray patted Teebo on the back. “But is the ceremony bothering you for…reasons other than the trees chanting?”  
  
Teebo shrugged. He could not quite explain if he was afraid of aunts like Bozzie pinching his cheeks and calling him a heartthrob before he even knew what that meant, uncles like Kazak once looking below his belly when he had long ago stopped soiling himself, or if what was truly scary had been their expectations.  
  
“It’s too much. All of it. And the hood is ugly. I don’t want it long. And I don’t want it red.” He was running out of complaints that made sense. “And everybody is going to be there!”  
  
“So…you don’t like attention?”  
  
“No, sir.”  
  
“Neither do I. That is why I am always here by myself. Sure, that gets people talking and some of them make things up. But you, you have to honour your Elders and the Soul Trees. Think about that. The trees are not going to talk to you until you have allowed them to. And, in order to do so, you have to stop being afraid of the unknown.” He paused and looked at a small-bladed knife he used to clean up wounds of his patients. “As far as the known goes…imagine that everybody got shaved. You see, some of those who bother the quiet ones like us, they are quite small under that large amount of fur.”  
  
Teebo then imagined Weechee Warrick without his intimidating pattern of facial fur. That was funny! And how about Aunt Bozzie with her crimson lip paint on a shaved muzzle? That was scary, but it was funny, too!  
  
“And perhaps Fashkaa can make you a hood that you really like. That said, what’s wrong with the one you’re already wearing? Didn’t you say that yours was long and red? This does not look like long and red to me!”  
  
“What?” Teebo was confused. He reached up and realised that he had a piece of scrap leather on his head. “This? Oh, it got stuck because my…my ears are too big.”  
  
“It looks good. Here, see for yourself!”  
  
Logray picked Teebo up and showed him his reflection in the cauldron.  
  
  
“I think this looks good, too, chak!”  
  
“You could use some holes for those big ears, as you say, and straps, in case it gets windy, since it does not have a bib. How about I take you back to Fashkaa’s and tell her that? Would you like me to?”  
  
“Yes!” the wokling’s face lit up. He stopped crying.  
  
Fashkaa and Batcheela were close to calling the guards when Logray brought Teebo back to the Hoodmaker’s Hut.  
  
  
“Where have you been?” Batcheela asked. “I was worried sick!”  
  
Fashkaa cocked her head. “And what is that leather scrap on your head?”  
  
  
“I like it.”  
  
“That’s his new hood.”  
  
“Oh, it’s you, Master Logray.” Fashkaa crossed her arms. “Do you have an idea how much I worked on the hoods for tonight? And now he does not want to wear his!”  
  
“He is just a boy. Not one of your giant straw dolls that you use to cut the fabric.”  
  
“There is simply no time to adjust this so it looks presentable!” the hoodmaker was quick to protest. “It’s just not pretty enough.”  
  
She turned around, not looking at Teebo’s disappointed facial expression. And then Batcheela spoke.  
  
“Danvey, Fashkaa…I don’t want Teebo to wear something that he does not feel good in. He can be clumsy sometimes. He’s small, too. He could use something that he wouldn’t be able trip on. And perhaps Warok can bring him something nice from his scouting missions to decorate it so it’s not that bland.”  
  
She turned around. Teebo nodded and hugged his mother.  
  
“K’vark! I guess that this is going to be a long day. So, what are you waiting for? Come here, so I can see how I could strap this.”  
  
Teebo was over the Sistermoon. This turned out better than he had thought and he was sure that he had just made a new friend…who might know something about the trees and who had so many interesting things in his hut!  
  
Later that evening, he was dancing with his own shadow close to the orchestra. He was not as far away from other woklings as usual. In fact, a couple of them were dancing close to him and there had been a moment earlier that night when an older wokling allowed him to try and beat a drum. He was not quite what they expected – he had a unique sense of rhythm, but that was not to say that he couldn’t play. The trees were quick to start chanting to his beat. As usual, he would only hear an occasional “yubnub” and nothing more, but this was the first time that the ancient conifers were listening to him, in a way – as opposed to him listening to them.  
  
And the fact that somebody had been looking at him for a while did not bother him the slightest.  
  
“What a disgrace! There he is, cavorting with his own shadow!” Bozzie nudged her brother. “After everything he and old Logray put poor Fashkaa through today, he’s dancing. And you know what? He strikes me as one of those who will change his mind and eventually grow up to wear something outrageous on his head…and have a good story about it. I have seen that before.”  
  
“Bozzie…” Chirpa shook his head. He was doing his best not to laugh. His sister’s tendency to smother young ones was nothing new to him. His own daughter became especially bitey when she spent too much time with Bozzie.  
  
“You don’t understand this, Chirpa! I couldn’t even kiss him after you presented the group with their hood! He was laughing at me!”  
  
“So?”  
  
“Hmmpf!” Bozzie was clearly annoyed. “Well, don’t come complaining to me when the next generation of our apprentices turns out to be disobedient and rude!”  
  
A little farther away, Logray was enjoying the feast from afar. He was feeling slightly less lonely than he did most of the time. Until that morning, he had not seen the Sunstar flicker in a long time. While his experience had taught him to question anything and everything, he was pretty sure that the wokling could become a far better apprentice than his previous one, Zarrak - if he managed to awaken the voices within himself, that is. That misguided young outcast was, after all, the reason he had withdrawn from the rest of the village and the reason some of the villagers no longer trusted his powers. Maybe, just maybe, this encounter was a sign of better days for him, as well as for this wide-eyed fuzzy wokling.  
  
He discreetly waved his small ceremonial wand and directed a single Wistie Teebo’s way. The young Ewok stopped dancing, spread his hand and allowed the gentle, translucent creature to land on his palm. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Egg-cake with a hyphen is something resembling omelette. Eggcake, without a hyphen is the equivalent of the English language expression “milquetoast”. There’s a difference!
> 
> Fashkaa, the hoodmaker, previously appeared in the last chapter of Snowed In, where teenage Latara is her apprentice. She’s an OC.
> 
> Logray’s flashback is word-for-word what happens to him in the visual and verbal aspects of the story Chirpa tells to woklings at the beginning of Sunstar vs. Shadowstone – then a young warrior, he attacks Morag’s trained mantigrue with a lasso, the dragon-like creature carries him away to Morag’s lair inside of Mount Thunderstone and then, he serves the witch alongside her Yuzzum slaves, but in the process, also discovers that he’s got “nature powers” himself.
> 
> Logray’s first apprentice, Zarrak is the villain in the second season episode, The First Apprentice and he’s everything Teebo isn’t.
> 
> Kazak looking to see if Teebo’s got male genitalia is – sadly – a thing borrowed from real life nonsense here in Serbia. So many fathers and best men take photos of nude baby boys or close-ups of their penises to show off to colleagues, that the “real man” “pumped up the girl” and “had a [redacted]” – [redacted] being any word to refer to a male who, wow, has male genitalia.
> 
> The hood that Teebo eventually ends up on is the cap-like thing that he wears throughout the cartoon series.
> 
> Wisties or “Firefolk” are semi-sentient creatures native to Endor. Like little firefly people.


	4. Chapter 03

The next spring Warok, Batcheela, Teebo and the new baby that arrived shortly before the Harvest Festival finally moved into a proper hut shortly after the glider pilot was finally accepted into the warrior circle, having completed couple more ridiculous tasks. Of course, this required the intervention of Chief Chirpa himself. Bitter as he had always been, Head Elder Kazak then claimed that Batcheela had bribed the leader of the tribe with her famous vegetable stew. But it was only fellow grouches such as old Needoo who trusted him on that. Even Bozzie, the tell-tale of Bright Tree Village, laughed it off.  
  
Lumat, the long-absent carpenter and a friend of Kazak, had come back to the village, with his new wife, Zephee, and a wokling daughter expected to follow him shortly. He stressed that he had not come to help Warok out at all – he wanted his only child to receive his hood at his home village. The villagers were mesmerised – the wokling was exceptionally beautiful and she bore an exceptional amount of head fur, divided to two tiny braids.  
  
“Once she is old enough, she will be promised to Prince Jierhook,” said Lumat to Kazak. The Head Elder just nodded – that was sure going to be praised as a great decision on his Council’s behalf. If he managed to claim it as his own, that is.  
  
“And she is so much prettier than Chirpa’s brat,” he finally said. Lumat did not quite understand why that had been necessary, but he took great pride in the wokling’s looks and just nodded. “I made sure that her hood is something that reflects the status you had here and that you will have again, should you ever decide to come back.”  
  
“I still think we should have arranged her a fitting with…what was the name again?”  
  
“Fashkaa. And it’s not necessary. She is going to adore it.”  
  
That evening, the villagers have gathered underneath the Soul Trees. A handful of woklings were to receive their hoods, amongst them Chief Chirpa’s son that never was – a daughter named Kneesaa with fur as white as snow. They were suspicious, standing there bare-headed among the hooded ones, for the first time realising that they had not truly been Ewoks until that very moment. An orchestra was playing “Knaa Naa", the song of the Soul Trees themselves. Little Teebo, with his shapeless, strappy hood resembling a plain cap, was drumming as best he could. The trees were singing a different melody than the Ewoks surrounding him and he was not sure whom to follow. Similarly, the Firefolk, or the Wisties, as the children of the tribe would more often call them, were flying around, in patterns resembling the stars. He was mesmerised. How come that nobody else was able to see the beauty that was there all along, beyond this very ceremony?  
  
“Drum roll! Drum roll!” He heard Aunt Bozzie yell from behind him. He did not realise that he had stopped drumming at some point. He clumsily picked the brushed bones that he was using as drumsticks and joined the other two little drummer boys. A very small wokling squeaked from the arms of his mother, Shodu Warrick.  
  
“Wicket!” Bozzie pointed the finger at the tiny creature. Shodu frowned. The tribe leader’s sister never behaved like that around her older sons, Weechee and Willy.  
  
Chief Chirpa approached the woklings. His face was glowing with pride – there was his surviving child, standing right before him, the first in line to receive her hood. Standing next to him was the Head Elder Kazak, carrying a handful of small hoods. Sometimes, the young Ewoks would grow out of them within one snow; if they were on a growth spurt, they might rip through the head fabric and require a new one to be made for them. And sometimes they receive them so big that they keep on wearing them far into their adulthood. Such was the case of Lumat’s wife, Zephee. She had not been present at her fitting back in the day.  
  
The leader of the tribe begun his speech. He knew every single word of it by heart and he loved it from the depth of his very heart.  
  
"Tonight we gather here, in the shadows of our sacred Soul Trees, to honour these young Ewoks. Like the trees planted for each of you on your birthday, you have grown strong and tall. Always have the Ewoks and the trees lived together, each protecting the other in times of danger. And this bond will grow, as you now take now your first steps toward your great life with the tribe!"  
  
With these words, he took a pink hood from Kazak’s hands. At first, it seemed that the Head Elder was not willing to let it go, that he wanted it to rip apart between the two of them, but that must have been the heat of the moment.  
  
“There you go, my daughter. Someday you will lead Bright Tree Village!”  
  
Kneesaa was humble, but she could not contain her excitement. This hood had been in the colour of the flowers she used to pick with her mother and sister and the blue gem attached to the head fabric, right above her forehead, was the only memory she had of her older sister, Asha.  
  
The crowd cheered. So did Teebo. He knew Princess Kneesaa and he was hoping that now that she too was a hooded wokling, she would never bite him again. Perhaps they could play with straw dolls or wooden bordoks someday?  
  
Just then, the small wokling in Shodu Warrick’s arms kicked him in the back of the head with his tiny feet.  
  
“Wicket!” Bozzie went again. Shodu smirked and went to sit on the other side.  
  
Five other woklings received their hoods that night and each time, Chief Chirpa had nothing but words of praise for them. The last one in line was the one that most of the villagers had not seen before.  
  
“Is that Lumat’s daughter?” somebody asked.  
  
The wokling nodded and stuck up her nose. The great Chief and his father’s friend were coming her way.  
  
“Latara, the daughter of our Honorary Elder Lumat, who now lives in the Green Haze Village. It’s a great honour to have you here tonight. Don’t ever forget who you are and where you came from, even when you’re far away from your home. Even when you are forever away from home.”  
  
The wokling seemed surprised that he knew her name. He smiled and reached out to the Head Elder. Kazak handed him a pure white hood with an aura blossom woven on it and a pair of lantern bird feathers dangling from the side. Chirpa had not seen it before. Had he seen it, he would have been slightly suspicious of his Elders’ intentions and the message that he was trying to convey. For one, he, not they, was the one supervising Fashkaa.  
  
Nevertheless, the hood soon covered the young girl’s braids and fell over her narrow shoulders, all the way to her ankles. But she was not smiling. She was not looking at the fabric, or seeking water barrels nearby to observe her reflection.  
  
“I don’t like white!” She suddenly screamed at everybody around her. “And I don’t like this stupid flower! I am never going to be white…no offense to you.” She pointed to Kneesaa.  
  
“What is she doing?” Lumat yelled from the crowd. “Daughter, once you have received your hood, you just…don’t walk around hoodless like that!”  
  
“K’vark, father! My name is Latara, and you need to remember that!”  
  
“Did she really say that out loud, in the middle of the Hood Festival? Zephee?” Lumat was horrified.  
  
The grey-furred girl then stomped her feet and stepped on her hood, then she proceeded to tear it apart, right across the middle of the woven blossom.  
  
“You are a princess?” she addressed Kneesaa, who still stood there, clutching the ends of her new pink hood to her chest. “Too bad. I’m so much prettier than you. Why can’t I be a princess?”  
  
Kneesaa was not sure if she was terrified or amazed, if she wanted to be friends with this girl or if she was afraid of her. This Latara, she had the power of a whole herd of bordoks, and she seemed to be surveying the crowd.  
  
Just then, the angry girl smiled. She appeared to have spotted somebody.  
  
“Wait.” She ran back to the remains of her torn hood and recovered a lantern bird feather from it. Oddly enough, they were not damaged.  
  
Teebo had been observing all of this with his mouth wide open. He was not sure what was going on, but the trees seemed to be whispering something in the lines of there being nothing wrong about it. He was recalling the previous year and his wish eventually having been met with respect. Why couldn’t have they done so for Latara?  
  
And just then, he realised that she was walking right up to him, bare-headed, with two lantern bird feathers in her left hand. She stopped before him, cocked her head and observed him. Then she took one of the feathers and stuck it in the notch on the side of his hood.  
  
Her comment did not make much sense to him.  
  
“It looks better that way.”  
  
“G…goopa.” He said. Or at least he thought that he said that. It could have just been a squeak, after all.  
  
“Green eyes.” She turned his head toward her, stopping him from looking away. “Drums. I have a flute, but my father doesn’t like it when I play it.”  
  
Teebo smiled. Nobody liked it when he played drums, and yet there he was, in the wokling orchestra.  
  
“You are cute.” The girl continued. “You would look good next to me. I am going to marry you when I grow up. And if any other girl comes across, I am going to fight her!”  
  
His heart was beating fast. But somehow, he could not hide a smile slowly forming on his face. Nobody had told him anything like that before, or at least nobody who did not colour her lips crimson and nobody without a protruding chest.  
  
“I’m Teebo.” He finally managed to utter, offering her his hand.  
  
“I’m Latara.” She attempted to bow, the way she saw the white-furred princess do it. “Your wife.”  
  
“I don’t want a wife…” he pulled out his hand.  
  
“You do. All boys do! We can play hut and someday –” she leaned to whisper into his ear. “– we can play healers, too. And you’re going to be privileged, because I am the prettiest girl on Endor. Just ask Prince Jierhook…who is uglaay! Nowhere near as cute as you.”  
  
Why was she pulling the words out of his mind, out of his head? The “hut” part, that is. He had no idea what the “healers” part was supposed to mean.  
  
Who was Prince Jierhook? And how come he looked better than him?  
  
And why was he suddenly able to hear what the trees were saying?  
  
“You can see her, through her, above her…but you cannot see beyond her.” The choir of green- and golden-needled conifers echoed inside of his head. “You cannot see beyond her. There is nothing beyond her. She is your brightest star, she is the brightest of the stars.”  
  
And just like that, every single word uttered by the creatures of the forest was no longer gibberish to him. His nature powers had been finally awakened, by the most powerful of them all. Somebody, in her childish sincerity, was the first Ewok to believe in him, other than those whose blood flowed through his veins.  
  
And this was where little Teebo knew that you could not truly see without truly being seen. He would come to the same conclusion many more times and was surer and surer of it each time, but it would always happen with his beloved Latara.  
  
The one time he had been shattered to pieces on the outside and the inside, he needed to be able to see again in order to understand who he became. And to connect his real self to his former self he, once again, needed Latara.  
  
Many years later, the first time they spent the night together, he needed those moments when the Sistermoon would peek from underneath the clouds, to bravely oppose the Cold Metal Moon and to tell him that, yes, many creations of the Spirits themselves were born shy, but that there was no shame in being in love and indulging in love.  
  
And finally, the night they first fell asleep with their newborn daughter nursing between them, he knew why woklings were blind for the first moon of their lives or so.  
  
For everybody had to learn how to see - _but before that, they had to be seen_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prince Jierhook and his, Green Haze Village, were entirely made up for this and future stories. The idea of Lumat having temporarily been a nomad and then living in another village where he married Zephee and where they had Latara will be elaborated in another story.
> 
> Honorary Elder is a title I made up for "expats".
> 
> Kneesaa does get the blue gem from her sister, Asha, as shown in the flashback in the last episode of the first season. The symbolism of the colour pink was made up on spot.
> 
> The lantern bird feathers do appear on both Teebo and Latara's hoods during the cartoon series.
> 
> Chief Chirpa's speech is taken from the Ewoks pilot, The Cries of the Trees, word for word.
> 
> Teebo’s near-death experience happens in the last third of Snowed In.
> 
> Latara and Teebo consummate their relationship in The Other Moon.


	5. Epilogue

The flame from the hot, spherical metal shape vanished the moment Teebo signalled to his friends that the story was indeed over. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes again. He could not see the pictures forming before the others, but they were playing an equally vivid holo-theatre on the other side of his eyelids, to the point where he did not realise that his eyes had been closed all along.  
  
“Ummm…err…can somebody please turn on the light?” Twig’s tenor broke the silence. “The sensor is not reacting to my hands and I am almost c-completely night blind.”  
  
Teebo clapped. He always thought that a chosen being had to do so, that the bringer of light in a hut was the hut owner, the one that the home spirits would speak to. Now there was the light and his illusion was shattered. Even after so many years of exposure to the Otherworldly Things, he was not quite sure how they worked sometimes, and if they had ever relied on the spirits at all.  
  
As a stark contrast to these doubts, the sight of the four beings in his audience was more than welcome. Latara was smiling broadly, he could see it in her eyes, even though she was trying her best to look disappointed because she had lost the dare.  
  
“Chak, you won, honeydrop. Happy?” She stuck her tongue out again.  
  
“Happy.” He reached out to rub his small nose against her prominent one. Everything else about the two of them was small the other way round, but not their noses.  
  
Twig smiled and lay his head on the woman’s shoulder. There may have been a tear or two forming on his face, but Teebo could not quite tell. It was not as though the Human man did not cry a lot these days, anyway.  
  
“Sorry about that light comment. I had to watch…experience…observe that with my spectacles off...and once the light of your story vanished, I could not find them.” He said. “They allow me to see, but sometimes, they don’t allow me to see, y’know?” He pulled his face into a sheepish grin, much like Batcheela’s. Regardless of the species, some beings smiled just like others, Teebo thought.  
  
But where was Luufi?  
  
And what was that rubbing against his foot from below the table?  
  
He reached out with his right hand and pulled his daughter out of her hiding place. Unsurprisingly – maybe – she was wearing the night blindness-adjusted spectacles.  
  
“I cannot see with these on! Not at all!” she stopped to pout and stick her tongue out, just like her mother would. “Everything is in the strangest of the colours, just like when I cannot sleep and when they are all talking to me, but I don’t know what they’re saying. And it does not resemble anything! But it’s dark down there either way…right?” Disappointed, she handed the spectacles back to Twig.  
  
“It takes time, Luufi.” He blew into the spectacles, and they were foggy again, just like the ceiling had been once Teebo had clouded it with his nature powers before telling his story. “It takes time,” he said again and rubbed the glasses against his partner’s green coat. Now they were translucent once again. “And nobody ever guarantees that you won’t be seeing the fog and clouds again. To chase them away forever, you have to know what you are feeling and what the others are feeling. You have to know.”  
  
“I always knew that mommy was a star.” She begun, oblivious to the expression on Twig’s face when she used that word in that context. “But I never knew that she was the brightest of the stars! And daddy…was that really you? You looked nothing like me and a lot like Theesa!”  
  
Teebo felt that a silent tear was coming, but he then looked at the four smiles before him and he knew that there was no need to cry. Still, Luufi’s confusion was evident.  
  
“That’s a story for some other time, when you’re just a little older than you are right now, Luu.” He said.  
  
“I have a story for you, too. But…but…also when you’re just a little older than you are now.” Twig added. His story could have been even more frightening than Teebo’s and he had just realised that he never told the whole of it to a single person.  
  
“So, what is mommy supposed to do?” the wokling asked again. “She lost the dare!”  
  
“Luufi!” Latara scolded her daughter for the first time that night. “Why did you have to remind us of that?”  
  
Teebo pulled Luufi to himself with his left hand. “I am going to whisper it to you.”  
  
“Chak, daddy! Did I say that right, ‘chak’ as ‘yes’?”  
  
He nodded and proceeded to whisper to her. Luufi then got up and took a jar of jam from the table, walked over to her mother and nonchalantly emptied it on her head.  
  
Latara was caught by surprise. When she was half as young, during the time that she spent denying her feelings for Teebo because youth is strange and sometimes, peer pressure gets the best of everybody, she did not like getting dirty or wet. And somehow, that happened all the time now.  
  
“Teebo! I mean, Luufi!” she screamed. And then she looked up. “Whatever. I deserved this. And I can still see the stars – no, Teebo, not in the way I meant it when we were much younger – and sometimes, that’s enough. After all, swarms of stars surrounding you are better than swarms of bees biting you…when you have jam on your head and all.” Latara winked and some jam dripped from the top of her head got onto her nose. Luufi shrugged and licked it off.  
  
“Mommy, was that Endor enough?” she asked. “Or is this what everybody would call ‘savage’?”  
  
“Wait, is this parenthood?” Twig looked very worried. “I don’t think I will ever be able to have children and I don’t know all that much, but…is this parenthood?”  
  
“I don’t know, try it yourself?”  
  
Teebo and Latara both laughed. Latara got her flute out and started playing, with all that jam still dripping over her face. The Humans proceeded to replicate the scene, smearing a tiny bit of jam on each other’s noses, then licking each other’s noses in turn, eventually determining that this did not make sense to anybody and ultimately calling each other gross.  
  
"Gross and hard to lick anything off his nose. His nose is slightly crooked, you see." The woman said. "He once punched himself in the face and that was the consequence of it."  
  
"But yours is small and cute. And this was not savage, it was only kind of stupid. We should have licked the glass ceiling instead. The swarms of stars.” Twig said and looked at his partner.  
  
She smiled and pointed upwards.  
  
“The stars are like swarms up there when they don’t make sense. But it’s up to us to chart them. They look different from every single spot in the Galaxy, from every single place you are. And, at the end of the day, once the night has fallen, everything is love. Everything.”  
  
_The stars are like swarms up there when they don’t make sense. But it’s up to us to chart them. They look different from every single spot in the Galaxy, from every single place you are. And, at the end of the day, once the night has fallen, everything is love. Everything._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first sentence of this should remind you of something else.
> 
> A huge thanks to @divapilot for her observations that made me explore the night-vision glasses symbolism further.
> 
> To those who did not read The Other Moon, teenage Latara’s euphemism for sex was “seeing stars with somebody” and, in the previous story, “taking somebody to see the light spirit”.
> 
> The last sentence is repeated on purpose.

**Author's Note:**

> The trading post mentioned here is a later incarnation of the former Salfur's Trading Post. It's the very same place shown in A Rough Trade. I can imagine that it's located on a clearing, because it would have required some extreme piloting skills otherwise.
> 
> Honey melon pie is typically served at the Fall Festival (no Wook link, mentioned in Blue Harvest) and its youth dance/masquerade counterpart, The Shadownight Festival, but I can imagine that it can be eaten whenever available.
> 
> Spikeback pike is fanon. If the chickens have a little tusk type of a thing, rabbits have three ears...why wouldn't a pike be all spiked?
> 
> I don't know what a "dual tube phasing modulator" and "TMZ-102015" are. Neither do you.
> 
> Batcheela’s chicken sausages and vegetable stew appear in Snowed In, but Latara's memory is wrong. Malani once, in that same story, called Kneesaa's stew better than Batcheela's. Either way, since Latara was not present in that scene, Malani's claim must have become a common misconception. :p
> 
> I did not quite plan not to mention the name of the character who goes by Kami in A Rough Trade. The idea is that Yehan came up with the name when he was learning to speak both Ewokese and Basic, while Twig is a nickname Luufi came up with. So, since I would otherwise have to spoil some pretty big things, I went with just not mentioning the name. I am otherwise very well aware of the consequences of leaving a female character nameless, but this is - I assure you - not that kind of a thing.
> 
> By now, it should be clear who Twig is, if you read my other stories.


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